Thursday, October 6, 2016

Recently a set of
circumstances has given me more time than usual to spend searching for
ancestors. (Yay me!) I have had to marvel at how the information began to roll
in as I dug a little deeper, and also just because I had done something.

The first example was
being contacted by a cousin on my husband Howard’s side; the surname is
Wressell, from Yorkshire, England. I thought that we had the research pretty
well wrapped up on that line – but can we ever say that? When Carol contacted
me, I ran the name through newspapers.com to see if I could help her with her
part of the family. Quite by accident (not really), I found an article on Percy
Wressell, who had fought with Canadian troops during WWI and been killed.

The Winnipeg, Canada Tribune, 16 June 1917

Of
course, that meant I had to determine where he fits in the family, and that
research led to finding his mother, Mary Jane, as well as four siblings. The
deeper I dug, the sadder the story became. Every record that listed an
occupation for her was either as “servant” or “domestic.” You don’t need to
have watched every season of “Downton Abbey” to know that female servants were not
only the lowest rung of the social ladder in late 19th century
England but also the most vulnerable.

The 1871 Northowram, Yorkshire, English Census

In all of the vital, church and census
records I found for Mary Jane or her five children, I found no reference to a
husband/father; in fact, I located two baptismal records for two of the
children where the space for the father’s name had a line through it and under
the children’s names was written “privately baptized.”

West Yorkshire Church of England Baptismal record, 1879

I found the eldest
child, Walter, on a list of “Lunacy Patients Register” at age 17, and then a
later record of his death in the same institution in 1913 at age 41.

UK "Lunacy Patients Admissions Records," 1879

Mary Jane's daughter Amy died before she was two years of age. Mary Jane died,
as listed in the “Nonconformist” records, at age 47 in 1892.

The website
newspapers.com can be a great tool for researching ancestors, but it is a bit
tricky, as it relies on the computer’s ability to read old newsprint. Further,
if you have a name that is very common or is a noun in everyday use, there may
be just too many hits to be able to narrow down. But another of Howard’s surnames
is McTaggart, which is a much simpler name for which to search. In a typical
migration pattern, the McTaggarts came from the British Isles to Canada and
some filtered down into Michigan, where one of them, Louisa, married my Howard’s
great-grandfather’s brother. The search for McTaggarts in newspapers.com
revealed a notice in the Port Huron (MI) Times Herald that “A message received
by Mr. and Mrs. David McTaggart Thursday evening told of the sad news of the
death of Captain Harold Ross, killed in action…”

Of course, I couldn’t just
note that fact down and go on my way. It turns out that Captain Ross was the
only child of Harold and Nellie Ross, and that Nellie Ross and Florence McTaggart
were sisters from the Peter and Agnes (McCorkendale) Wright family of Ontario.
Normally an officer is pretty easy to locate in one of several family history
sites, but somehow, Capt. Ross has slipped through the cracks and it seems to
be up to me to make sure he is not forgotten.

Another name easy to
search is one from my side of the family: Alberghini. A broad search revealed
that one of my Alberghinis from Renazzo, Italy married an Irish girl from
Boston, Mae Nugent. She had seven siblings, including a little brother who died
when he was only four years old.

Finally, the saddest
story of all comes from my mother’s husband’s family, the Wheelers. His was a
fairly prominent family in Newport, RI and one of the branches of the family
was the Knowe family. The headline from 1943 read: Janet, Susan Knowe drown in
Maryland.” According to the news article, the two girls, 8-and 4-years old were
“wading on a sandbar while the mother was on the shore tending her 10-months-old
baby.”

It is difficult to
imagine the enormity of the pain suffered through so much sadness. I was contemplating
this recently while attending our local LDS (Mormon) Atlanta Temple. As I
pondered, I felt as if my spiritual eyes were opened, and I felt as never
before the infinite depth and breadth of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and His
healing power – and not just in this life, but for families throughout all
eternity.